The present invention relates to the field of collaboration software and, more particularly, to persisting annotations within a cobrowsing session.
Cobrowsing is becoming an increasingly important tool within the enterprise collaborative software domain. Cobrowsing can permit multiple users to joint navigate one or more Web resources (e.g., Web pages). That is, several users can view the same Web pages simultaneously while participating in a collaboration session. For example, users participating in a Web conference can be presented with a Web page which a moderator has selected based on a navigation action (e.g., selecting a hyperlink). These cobrowsing sessions are enabled typically through cobrowsing applications which can often take the form of Web applications and/or widgets which execute inside a Web browser. These applications are typically initiated from a special Uniform Resource Locator (URL) associated with the application. This URL initializes the application and permits synchronized navigation (e.g., cobrowsing) within the application to occur.
Traditional annotations are stored via associating the URL of a Web page with the annotation. This approach, however, fails when a cobrowsing session is initiated. Consequently, these annotations are lost when the cobrowsing session is terminated due to the mechanism in which the annotations are handled. Web page navigation is performed by the application and thus the browser URL remains unchanged regardless of the URL (e.g., Web page) requested within the cobrowsing session. That is, the browser reflects a URL of the cobrowsing application which is different from the URL managed by the application (e.g., the URL requested). Due to this mechanism, it is often difficult for cobrowsing applications to permit user created annotations to persist between sessions.
One mechanism is to store Web browser session data externally via third party tools by obtaining the URL of the Web browser. However, since the URL of the Web browser is the cobrowser application URL, the annotations cannot be extracted since application data is private to the application and cannot be accessed by third party tools readily. Further, this technique can be cumbersome and limited in its usability. Once exported from the cobrowsing session, the annotations can lose meaning because it has been removed from the context of the session (e.g., the Web page associated with it). For instance, when an annotation is extracted, the metadata and/or contextual information that it is associated with is not exported, leaving the annotation without a context which can erode the usability of the annotation. Further, this technique requires manual manipulation of annotations which can be a time consuming and error-prone process.